What made you realise you might have been poor growing up ?

[LanaL]

As the title suggests - when you think back to your childhood is there anything that makes you realise you were poor ?

When I was younger at Christmas , we didn’t have stockings at the end of our beds , we had carrier bags . Like Asda carrier bags . I loved it, I always found it magical to wake up and Santa had put presents in our carrier bag!

Again at Christmas , every individual thing was wrapped - I always remember having mountains of presents , but looking back lots of them were cheap and small ( not that it mattered to me ! ) one of my favourite presents that we used to get each year was a paper folder full of plain white paper. This folder would be decorated with our name and drawings of things we liked ( I remember one year it was decorated with drawings of hedgehogs because I loved hedgehogs ) and separately would be a packet of felt pens wrapped up . I loved that , my mom and dad would sit with us and we would all draw and colour together !

Asking for snacks / drinks - we never , ever would have dreamed of going to get a bag of crisps without asking. We could make squash but fizzy pop had to be asked for . Also - milk ! It was like a luxury , never could we just pour a glass of milk ! Very rare that we actually ever drank a glass of milk . Looking back I think my parents struggled but you don’t realise that at the time . I’m the total opposite now , my children do have to ask for unhealthy snacks so I can limit them but there are always plenty and they don’t eat loads so I never really say no and things like fruit or food - like if they want toast or a sandwich - they can help themselves .

Pudding / desert - I always have something available , it may not always be a cake but there is always something - cookies , muffins , yoghurts etc always something they can have after dinner but as a child we never had it and if ever we happened to - mom had got a cake or baked - it was a huge treat .

we never ate out. I can’t remember a single time we ever went out to a restaurant or a pub for food . I don’t have a single memory of going for a meal with my family as a child and , actually, I remember arranging a meal for my 21st after I had moved out and I’m pretty certain I remember thinking that this was the first time I had been for a meal with my family. One of my brothers weren’t there so I don’t think I’ve ever sat with my parents and all my siblings at a meal .

I never saw my mom in new clothes until I was an adult and her and my dad had seperated. I remember her wearing very random t shirts, that had been my dads or I know someone had given to her and my dads t shirts were work ones , he always seemed to be in work clothes .

I remember some of my clothes being what people had given to us , or my aunt worked in a video store and she always had merchandise so i remember having t shirts with film logos on .

Shopping - my mom would go out most days with her shopping trolley , walking , to the high street and she would do this most days with a list that has prices next to each item ( exact prices , like £1.59 ) I now realise that she was on that tight a budget that she counted every penny , went with the trolley to get what she could and walk home as she couldn’t afford taxis or buses. She walked everywhere ! My dad had cars on and off but would work during the day .

Holidays - we went on holiday once as a family that I remember , vaguely , as I was about 6 . I went on holidays with family friends and family but not as a family .

My mom never had her hair done . I vaguely remember her having a perm once , that’s it. She used to shave my dads head , and my brothers . Me and my sister would have our fringe cut by my mom and a family friend would cut our hair. But I do remember when I was in secondary school mom would take me for haircuts at the hairdresser. I wonder know how much she had to budget for that .

As a parent now , I realise how much my parents struggled and how they sacrificed for us because in light of the above this is what I also remember :

Every Christmas my brothers would have the latest console and I would have what I had asked for , along with loads of small presents that I now realise were to bulk up .

Once we were in secondary school - our PE tracksuits were named brand , always from the lady over the road who ran a catalogue . Our coats in secondary school were branded - again catalogue- as were my brothers shoes . At our ages it was “rock port “ or “ kickers “ they always had them . Our bags were what others had . My shoes were what all the other girls were wearing . No matter what clothes we may have had at home or the budget they were on they made sure that we never went to school in anything that could get us teased . The fact this was from catalogues makes me realise they must have really struggled to do that .

We went on lots of picnics ! To local parks , and we would have to go to the high street to go to “ kwik save “ to get the things , it would be own brand , but my mom would make it so exciting ! She would play games with us on the long walk , she would get some nice cakes , treat us to cans of pop .

At home she would sit playing consoles with my brothers , playing with my toys with me .

I remember being surprised one day and told I was going on holiday that day with my moms friends and their children . It was the best thing ever and I remember a few days before we had gone around charity shops and had got me some new clothes- I didn’t think to myself that we were buying second hand things I just felt really appreciative that I was being treated !

We clearly didn’t have a lot . But I never thought that we were poor because my parents ( mainly my mom ) did everything in their power to make sure we lived a good , normal life .

Think I want to go and give my mom and dad cuddle now !

It reminds me of my childhood too. The make do stockings were usual and part of the charm. No central heating for much of childhood, clothes nearly all hand me down or secondhand (though I loved the regular bag of clothes I'd receive from a relative's older teenage daughter). Sweets were once on week on a Friday. No TV, no landline, no colour TV (once we had a TV). No eating out. No branded clothing.

Though my parents were very bad with money, especially after my parents divorced and remarried, and they were frequently in debt (requiring knocks on the door to be ignored from debt collectors) and even food would be scarce. Without my grandparents helping we wouldn't have managed. But we were middle class and I went to private school mostly and even boarded (once I had to leave a school as they just stopped paying the fees until they were eventually called in). It was all very odd.

I can't find it now, but the post from the person who had to use the bed sheet as a towel then hang it to dry for later use on the bed sounds like dreadful example of poverty. I can't imagine how awful that must have all been.

Dumpling stew and always empty cupboards in the kitchen but i never felt it because she always made sure i had a meal top eat when i was hungry. she was the master of whipping something up :D

No central heating
Lots of things wrapped like you
Ur post related alot to me OP like asking for things and unhealthy snacks not allowed because they was for packed lunch for school
The ice cream man coming and being told theres choc ices in the freezer

I didn't "feel we might have been poor" I just knew we were. It's something that was talked about very openly in our family. All our clothes were from jumble sales, some weeks we had very little money and would eat only very cheap food like rice, we never ate out, we weren't allowed to have baths, just a quick wash down at the sink every few days.
I didn't worry about being poor though. As a child I didn't think about paying the bills, we always had food and I felt so loved and happy.

Think it wouldve been helpful if everyone had put their decade.
Mine was 90s and early 2000s
I don't believe we were poor at all but suffered from poor money management
Grandparents had a basic house, functional curtains, furniture, didn't use much gas or electric and never cleaned the concrete garden of weeds.

From what I've been told by older colleagues many people earned more in early 2000s than they do now which makes sense .

We had a weekly takeaway and a weekly dine out. We lived in a rented house and had a lot of disposable income. My dad used to give me a weekly amount for saving at the age of ten-£20,30 and even £50 which I dutifully saved till it got to a grand and a half and gave it back
Most clothes were from Next

Things that were difficult,
we had a daily Sunday school to attend. Doctors kids would pay annually and we would pay monthly and the fees were often overdue which was embarrassing
Refused any kind of pocket money because we had everything we needed
Mum used to ration dinner money and literally go looking in her purse for 50p and £1 every day which was just humiliating when there's 4 kids so I just declined. The money wasnt enough to fill my tummy in high school
Only had one car despite clearly needing two

Then came the tough times

Parents had money to buy a house outright but went for an £80k mortgage on a rate of around £7-800 which was a week's wages for some then
The house was upper class from outside and needed a high standard of maintenance
There was a lot of repair work needed
Gardeners were literally gypsies from Europe who knew not a lot
Barbecues cost a lot
Recession hit and takings fell drastically
I had no financial support at all and got a scholarship to a fee paying school for 6 form
I had no car, no money for food or clothes, parents would take the little money I had from my bank account or under my bed
There were a lot of arguments with parents blaming me, all 4 kids fighting (all born within 5 years), no laptop/computer, threats of cancelling internet
There was no support when I hurt my back at work
The barbecues had continued, the repairs, poor garden maintenance, things breaking in the house, foreign holidays , sending money to foreign relatives on my dad's side

There was no money to pay for a part time course of £300 to help me get out of the house, mum gave me money secretly for train sometimes for college evening classes
I was given lifts everywhere by parents including my job in a factory. Otherwise it cost me £12 one way which was two hours wage
It was a dysfunctional house and what made it worse was constant visitors and lack of privacy.

I had a break down in the end and what helped was getting a job at any cost

Yes I look at people from the roughest council estates and they have a very middle class life compared to what their parents had(by the standards back then)

Interesting. It sounds like the middle class over dependence of adult children on their parents is not that new.

As others have said too, some of this is indeed poverty, some is that things were indeed 'different' and what would be seen as poverty now wasn't then- my grandparents were well off but mean and certainly didn't waste food, have snacks in , do home repairs often as they should, people genuinely were not constantly upgrading kitchens or doing loft extensions etc..

Some though as someone else mentioned were poor priorities or the fact an awful number of these posts had 'a lot' of kids.

There are so many reasons , so it's hard to compare like for like with today- Far more social housing available, more reasonably well paid roles for manual workers (mines, printing, docks , car plants etc) there were also a lot of controlling men who had plenty to be down the pub and betting on the horses- but kept their family short- men in a lot of households still really did rule the roost. It wasn't as simple as going back to work and your children at nursery or childminder- certainly when I had my 2 elder sons in early 80s - these were pretty rare- certainly in the midlands

Our grandparents would drop round huge bags of pasta ‘from the market’ I thought that was so exotic . It was actually out of date ! (But dried pasta so we never got Ill)

Playing ‘war rations’ we would make the little books and dm would play this game where we had a week pretending it was war town to see if we could survive on rations but it made it ‘fun’

we used to get these huge cheap plain (and horribly dry) cakes from a wholesaler place and it would get sliced up and we would have it with custard for breakfast / pudding/ supper

In the case of my family, the ‘lot of kids’ weren’t a choice. Catholic country with a deeply retrograde attitude to ‘artificial’ contraception built into law which lasted until the 90s in some aspects. Abortion was illegal.

So while I agree my parents had far too many children for their means, it’s not as straightforward as ‘hey made poor choices’. They made culturally-conditioned choices.

I think you were rich OP.

I grew up in the 80s without either of my parents. My grandparents had money, good jobs. We had central heating, food, 3 cars, holidays, Christmas presents etc. I remember the first time I went to visit my school friend in winter and they all sat round this one small fire in the living room. Ice on the inside of the windows in her bedroom. A chip roll for tea. I was only about 7 but I saw the difference. One thing she had that I didn't though, her mum. She had her mum. You had your mum OP and she sounds absolutely wonderful.

Mine was cunt. I didn't grow up rich, I grew up broken.

When I moved from a very rural part of the country in 1991
and started year 7 at grammar school in a large south east town.

Rural area, not a lot of people has money, there were no takeaways other than fish and chips there in the 80s really, it was all closed tin mines and farms.

When we moved when I was Age 11, I’d never been to the cinema, bowling or anything like that, never eaten Chinese food, never been on holiday apart from a cheap caravan in Wales once every Couple of years, basically going from a deprived area in Cornwall to a deprived area in Wales living off corned beef and beans and walking around in the rain with no money, so same shit, different day!

I was taken aback when I moved just how cultured everyone was. I got laughed at when I said I had never been on a plane, I went with a friend to the cinema for the first time when I was 12 and I didn’t know what to do.

I was invited to a friends house age 12 and they were having a Chinese takeaway. I didn’t know what Chinese food was. my dad always said takeaway food was too expensive (it was for us), so I was terrified all evening they would ask me to give them money for it. my friends family took the piss as they went thought the menu, asking me if I liked this or that and laughing when I said I didn’t know, I didn’t know what it was. then they gave me chopsticks and took the piss again when I didn’t know how to use them.

Oh, and other kids had clothes! Until I was 16 and I got a job, I had school uniform (bought when I was 11 and had to last until I was 16, that was fun), a couple of tracksuits to wear in the house and a couple of t shirts and jumpers.

I remember being amazed when I found out people went shopping for clothes just because. Ditto shoes. One pair of trainers until the soles were smooth and one pair of school shoes.

What changed for a lot of the council house families where I grew up was when the council paid them to move further out and if one person was living in one house. In one friend’s case her DM moved out to Jaywick and so did my friend. Others moved up north to buy cheap houses. Which sort of makes you wonder about social housing. Didn’t stop the son and brother of my friend from complaining their DM hadn’t done a right to buy on their SE London council house. Their DM told me at the time she wanted to move out, by the sea and away from an area where most of her friends had moved. And she retired at the same time.

Re ice on windows. My grandad’s flat had this for years in their rented flat before they got central heating.

Interesting thread.

For me i grew up in a single parent family, my mum also suffered from depression and was bad at managing money (still is!)

We lived in a 2 bedroomed council house, my mum didn't work as she was better off not until I was in full time work or education.

Things i recall:

Washing up liquid for shampoo

Cheap sanitary towells that were about 30p

Having to steal toilet roll from pubs

Eating well on payday (chip butty, 3 chocolate bars for lunch) then struggling rest of the week

Getting a tell the time watch for my birthday. I was so dissapointed i was 12

Buy as you view tv, we never had
enough money to put in the bloody thing

Lots of hire purchase items, my bed was took away when she couldn't keep up thd payments

Thank god for my lovely grandparents who bought my school uniform, fed me when we had nothing, took me on holiday etc.

Scottymom, same here - from a very early age I knew that money was very tight, so it was no use asking for anything like sweets, and toys were for Christmas and birthdays only.

Our weekly family outing for food shopping usually included a walk through an arcade where there was almost always a Shetland pony which you could have a ride on, for 6d. (2.5p). It had bells on its harness and I longed painfully every time for a ride on that pony, but never even asked.

Though having said that, I was animal-mad but had never been allowed any pets, apart from 2 goldfish, a b-day present from cousins. But down that same arcade was a pet shop that always had baby tortoises (now banned) in the window. I always stopped to look - longing painfully again - so was astounded when one day my father said, ‘Do you really want a tortoise?’

Little Timmy cost 4/6d - it seemed like a fortune - and the assistant just put him in a brown paper bag!

I kept him for several years, until he died (during hibernation) in the very long cold winter of 1963 (IIRC).

My mum always talked about the fried eggs which were halfed by her mum for the kids .Her dad got a whole one .
She only tasted fresh soft bread when she left home as older stuff had to be used up first . Apples were always wrinkled as again old had to be used first.
Every Saturday at my grans tea was whatever was left from that week's meals .So wee bit of pie , bit cold meat, fried potatoes and her famous fried scones ,They were really tasty.
Absolutely no food waste in that house .
They had been so poor my mum said she was always hungry,cold and poorly dressed .She passed her 11 plus but had to leave school and work ASAP. It really messed with her head and her siblings

A child of the 50’s and 60’s we weren’t poor but constantly told not to ask for anything and never to expect anything for nothing.
There wasn’t any central heating so the house was very cold unless you sat right in front on the coal fire, ice inside the windows and your bedding feeling damp from you breathing on it was normal. You had a hot water bottle, ice formed in a glass on the bedside table.
I was given pocket money but expected to save it to buy presents for my siblings, parents and grandparents at Christmas, birthdays, if we went on holiday my parents expected a generous present as thanks for taking me so I couldn’t spend it on myself.
If we went anywhere we were expected to repeatedly thank our parents, a walloping would follow if you hadn’t been sufficiently thankful 😵‍💫
In retrospect my childhood was very dysfunctional, very unhappy and definitely not what I wanted for my DCs.
Reading this thread has highlighted that, even if we weren’t poor materially we were very deprived emotionally.

@JenniferJupiterVenusandMars
If we went anywhere we were expected to repeatedly thank our parents, a walloping would follow if you hadn’t been sufficiently thankful 😵‍💫

That's a bit much having to buy a present to thank your parents for your holiday!

I had to thank my mother for the evening meal each day. Thank you followed by some compliment about it being nice for 'x' reason, even for something extremely mundane. I only thought that might be out of the ordinary when I automatically did the same having dinner at a friend's house and they were taken aback in surprise and remarked on it.

I remember lifts in the car being stopped for me because apparently I'd taken them for granted and hadn't been sufficiently grateful, yet I'd thanked for each and every one one.

I have to say this post has been eye opening .

maybe wording it as “poor” wasn’t right, after reading what some people went through then I would say in comparison to that we were well off! It’s awful to hear some of the stories and I’m so sorry for anyone who had to do that .

its more, for me , realising that we struggled ( well, my parents did ) but I was certainly rich in terms of the love I had .

It’s certainly different depending on the decade, some things I have said were just normal in the 70s/80s but not in the 90s / 00s . To clarify , I was born in 86 but these memories are more from the 90s/00s. I certainly realised we struggled far earlier than this post but I would say it was more when I moved out and had children that I really really realised because my parents just made the most of everything and didn’t ever talk to us about money . I would regularly hear “ No we’re skint “ but I also never went hungry and as I say my parents - more my mom - made sure we had all the nice clothes etc at school whilst I would see children bullied for being “poor” and I never was so I guess when we heard our parents saying they were skint , we never thought of ourselves as “poor” .

it’s certainly true that standards change too. Nowadays people will say they have no money and are struggling and it could well be that they just don’t have money for unnecessary things - which is not the definition of poor. I am in a lot of debt and I do live week to week , but I’ve never been unable to feed my children . I’ve never had to visit a food bank and I’ve never had to not eat so that my children can . I might sit and wallow when my child’s iPhone breaks and I can’t replace , or I’ll feel down and be self pitying because we cant afford a holiday or an expensive visit to Santa , or I see friends taking their children out for food on a weekend and we can’t do that but then if I say and thought - which I will do more now after this post - my children have laptops , consoles , toys . We have annual passes to theme parks , the children have clothes , I get my nails done sometimes , we ALWAYS have food in the cupboards and I give my children pocket money every month . So I’m not poor at all it’s just standards change and make you think that you don’t have enough or aren’t doing enough for children because there is always someone who has more and can do more , I don’t think social media helps this .

Thank you all for sharing. This was a lighthearted post that has been emotional and eye opening .

On the back of it I sent my mom a huge message yesterday listing everything she did for us , the memories she gave us and telling her I recognised her sacrifices and thanked her for everything - it made her cry!

My mum told everyone they were poor but they weren't (as relative as the 80s goes). What that actually meant was, we didn't go on holidays or days out, or eat fruit or wear nice clothes; but she drank branded cola and brought new cushions / pebbley shit / Clark's shoes / M&S clothes for herself every week.

Surely thanking your mother for dinner is just normal good manners? We always thanked our mother for dinner, cleared the table and did the washing up.

Having to answer the door to the provident loan lady and lie to her that my mum wasn't in because she couldn't afford to give them £10 that week (most weeks actually!).

My mum explaining to me aged about 10 that some people might come in the house to take some things away (bailiffs) but that she would hide my little black and white telly away so they couldn't take that. This was in the late 90's/early 2000's.

I have memories of consciously worrying that mum didn’t have enough money to pay the bills, from the age of 5 or 6. We’d have to hide behind the sofa from whoever was knocking at the door for payment, and it made me feel really anxious. We’d run out of electricity and have to do without.

We often had no food in the house. I had my first paid job in a greengrocers. I’d do an hour after school every day, putting potatoes from a sack into bags, and weighing them to make 5lb. I was paid 50p (this was late 1980s) an hour which would buy a big bag of chippy chips for dinner for me and my brothers.

As an adult I’ve always kept huge stocks of food. I’ve got a massive larder and a huge chest freezer as well as a tall upright freezer. I know it’s a throwback to childhood, but we managed to get through the whole of lockdown and only bought fruit, veg, and dairy so it came into its own eventually!